Contents

Introduction

Welcome to the lab notebook for the Cyanobacteria project! The goal of our team, composed of four members, is to reconstruct the cyanobacterial circadian oscillator system into E. coli. Three proteins, KaiA, B, and C, have been shown to have an in-vitro phosphorylation state oscillation (Nakajima et al. 2005) by transcriptional-translational independent methods. If this system can be reconstituted in E. coli, there are two important applications:

Synthetic Biology: Creating a functional, oscillating set of proteins is the next logical step from the synthetic "repressilator" system engineered by Elowitz et al. (2000). Although a good proof of concept, the "repressilator" lacks the stability needed from a robust oscillator such as the naturally evolved cyanobacterial oscillator. This robust oscillator could prove useful in an eventual biocircuit.

Circadian Biology: Cyanobacteria are the simplest model organisms for the study of circadian oscillation. Although circadian oscillation has been fairly well characterized, less is understood at the molecular level. By porting the oscillation system into E. coli, one can begin to understand more precisely the pathways involved in the genomic oscillation of cyanobacteria.

For more background information on the ciracadian system, please check out our "Literature" section. Otherwise, day-to-day work can be found under the "Lab Notebook" tab; we will post major results of our work and links to the days as they become available. If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact us: information is located at the main Harvard iGEM 2006 page. Thanks!